Airline traffic network planning may typically happen many months in advance of an anticipated usage of an airline schedule produced by such planning. On the other hand, an evaluation of a robustness of an airline schedule is typically done near the actual execution of the schedule (i.e., near or on the day of the flights comprising the schedule). In some regards, an airline may not know how robust their flight schedule is, or they may not know how to quantify and evaluate the robustness of flight schedule. The robustness of the flight schedule may only become known to them after the schedule has been operated (i.e., after it has been flown).
Given the drastically different timelines for optimizing an airline schedule and for evaluating aspects thereof, these two processes are typically isolated from one another, even though aspects of each process may be of interest to an airline or other entity.
Therefore, it would be desirable to design an apparatus and method that provides for an integration of schedule planning optimization and robustness evaluation for an airline.